Einstein: His Life And Loves

Albert Einstein was a fascinating man, and he continues to fascinate us. Though much has been written about him already, physics professor Barry Parker delivers a lucid account of Einstein's life and loves -- romantic and scientific -- that will be welcomed by those who are eager to learn more about the man and his ideas but may have been intimidated by the subject matter.

Parker covers a lot of territory from Einstein's early life in Germany to his death in America in 1955. We tend to think of Einstein as the old man with weird hair who taught at Princeton, but the most exciting events of his life happened before he ever came to America.

Einstein's father was an unsuccessful businessman who tried to run an electric company with his brother. Einstein's mother, in an attempt to steer him away from his father's example of failure, pushed him to excel in music and in his studies.

Because of the father's business failure, Einstein's family left him to finish school in Germany when he was 15 years old while they went to Italy to start over. A miserable Einstein soon followed his family and refused to go back to Germany. He hated the militaristic German education system and didn't want to be drafted when he came of age. He even renounced his German citizenship and eventually became a citizen of Switzerland.

Einstein's career will astound readers who are unfamiliar with his travails. When he was 16, having left school in Germany, he wanted to attend Zurich Polytechnic. Even though the legal age to take the exams was 18, Einstein--with the help of his mother's connections--persuaded the school administration that he had the intellectual and emotional maturity to enter the school.

He did well on the mathematics and physics portion of the entrance exams but flunked the general knowledge portion. So he moved in with a Swiss family and attended high school nearby. The next time he took the exams, he passed.

At Polytechnic Einstein was not an ideal student. He skipped lectures if professors bored him, and he got into disputes with other professors who disappointed him with their lack of relevant knowledge.

During this time Einstein also met Mileva Maric, another physics student and the woman who would eventually become his first wife. With her intelligence and interest in physics, Mileva would seem to be the perfect match for Einstein. However, a premarital pregnancy that resulted in giving up the child for adoption deeply affected Mileva. A morose person already, she seemed to lose what little joy in life she'd had.

The marriage eventually provided nothing but mental anguish for Mileva and became a millstone around the neck for Einstein. Later he divorced Mileva and married his cousin, Elsa, but this marriage was not a particularly good one for Einstein either in the romantic sense, and he often fell for more glamorous women.

While Einstein certainly had an eye for women, his great love would always be science. Most of the book is written in such a way that it would be perfectly appropriate for the curious young adult but there are a few chapters which will prove difficult for those readers whose thoughts tend toward the concrete rather than the abstract. And yet Parker manages to convey the excitement of discovery and the thrill of the intellectual hunt even when we don't understand exactly what is being hunted.

Although almost everyone knows that Einstein came up with the special theory of relativity, not many in the general public actually know what that means. This book provides a simplified explanation and gives a clearer idea of why his ideas were so revolutionary.

While Einstein was coming up with his brilliant theories, ironically, he couldn't get a teaching job. For one thing the physics professors didn't understand his ideas, which were over their heads. So Einstein worked at the Patent Office until finally various universities realized he was the most brilliant scientist of their time and it was an embarrassment that he didn't have a teaching job.

Einstein spent the last 22 years of his life in America, and that almost didn't happen. As Parker points out, "The Women's Patriot Corporation had originally been organized to help women get the vote, but it was now focusing on stopping `undesirables' from entering the United States, and at the top of their list of undesirables was Einstein." Apparently they thought he was a communist because he spoke out against Nazi aggression and became known for supporting pacifist and humanitarian causes.

We know they didn't succeed in keeping him out of the country. We also know that much to Einstein's dismay, his work was instrumental in developing the atomic bomb.

In the end readers will be left feeling as if they've been given a valuable opportunity to get to know this brilliant, complicated man. He had his flaws, but oh, what a heart and what a mind.

Pat MacEnulty, a former Sun-Sentinel staffer, is a freelancer who lives in North Carolina.